Some kind of asylum

Last month, the trial ended of 11 asylum seekers charged in connection with a fire at Yarl's Wood, the government's showpiece detention centre. Melanie McFadyean sheds light on the lives of the accused - and the questions that remain unanswered

Some kind of asylum

Last month, the trial ended of 11 asylum seekers charged in connection with a fire at Yarl's Wood, the government's showpiece detention centre. Melanie McFadyean sheds light on the lives of the accused - and the questions that remain unanswered

Saturday 6 September 2003 06.11 EDT
First published on Saturday 6 September 2003 06.11 EDT

Had you been driving along the A6 towards Bedford on the night of February 14, 2002, you would have seen a blazing glow spreading out against the night sky. Closer up, you would have seen a massive fire behind a 17ft high perimeter fence. You would have witnessed a scene of chaos, with fire engines, police and dogs, helicopters grinding overhead. Perhaps you would have got close enough to see signs telling you this was Yarl's Wood detention centre.

This was New Labour's showpiece, Europe's biggest asylum detention centre, with room for 900. There were several hundred asylum seekers there that night, including 29 children and seven babies under a year old. They were from 60 different countries, and they were scared. So were the 70 or so employees of Group 4 Falck Global Solutions UK Ltd, which runs Yarl's Wood. It had been open for only three months. As a riot broke out and fires began, there was a lot at stake - not only the lives of those inside, but corporate and political reputations to protect.

The fire sent shock waves through the heart of the government's immigration policies. By dawn, half of the centre, built to meet government targets to remove asylum seekers, was gutted. The justification for locking them up is that, having reached the end of the asylum claims process, they might "abscond". Of the 385 in the detention centre on the night of the fire, only 36 went on the run. All but 14 are now accounted for, according to Bedfordshire police, and of these, "there are only three that the authorities have no intelligence on whatsoever".

In April this year, at Harrow crown court, the trial began of 12 men charged variously with arson and violent disorder during the night of the Yarl's Wood fire. On the first day, as they sat outside the courtroom, two Nigerians, Lucky Jacobs and Henry Momodou, seemed surprisingly relaxed. Momodou, a big man, leaned his elbows on his knees. As the pair chatted, Jacobs turned and looked over his shoulder and suddenly doubled up laughing. Momodou joined in. They had caught sight of their friend and fellow Nigerian Thomas Kalu walking towards them with an elegant swagger, wearing a well-cut suit of a colour so subtle you couldn't name it. Kalu, as penniless as the others, had borrowed it for the trial. He is lithe and strong, with high cheekbones and dark almond eyes, and just then he looked like a film star. The laughter subsided and Momodou said in his quiet, sombre voice, "Even if we laugh, on the inside we're dying."

They greeted their co-defendants, Klodjan Gaba and Agron Kastrioti from Albania, and George Tuka, a Kosovan. Petr Hrubis, a Roma from the Czech Republic, smiled shyly. Behar Lemani, an Albanian Roma, arrived a few moments later, spic and span and pale as a sheet. Most of them had come on long and difficult journeys to the UK, cramped in the backs of trucks, at the mercy of the agents and gangsters who run the rackets that get people to a place of safety. These men are people most of us never meet, the people referred to as illegal immigrants, bogus asylum seekers, economic migrants and, occasionally, "genuine" asylum seekers. This terminology makes them easy to ignore - as if they are not real human beings. Locking them up indefinitely, although they have committed no crime, denying them the right to work, rendering them destitute, becomes acceptable.

Just before the court opened, an anxious barrister approached the Africans, asking if any of them was Mr Ojo. They shook their heads. Ojo Johnson had jumped bail. It's surprising the others didn't follow his example. If found guilty, they knew they would get prison sentences, as one of them did at the start - Aliane Ahmed, the only one to plead guilty to a charge of violent disorder. If acquitted, they stood to be deported.

Lucky Jacobs says Yarl's Wood was always at boiling point. The fact that the detainees had freedom of association and reasonable facilities did not lessen the frustration, powerlessness and uncertainty they felt. He and the other Nigerians in the dock - Momodou, Kalu and Abdul Kayode - had been involved in an informal group representing detainees' complaints to management, something encouraged by Group 4. "The atmosphere was stressful. People were desperate about their cases," says Jacobs. "They'd had promises from the Home Office, been told they'd be released or deported, but then found they were there for two or three months or more. Many could not get hold of their solicitors. The payphones cost £5 for two minutes. If you came in with money, you couldn't get it from them, so you couldn't buy a phone card, and you were only eligible to be handed one if you were destitute." Jacobs says he witnessed two suicide attempts. There were hunger strikes. Other detainees spoke of difficulty accessing medical services and being handcuffed to go to hospital.

Some of their grievances were endorsed by Bishop John Richardson in his submissions to Bedfordshire county council's inquiry into the night of the fire, in which he stressed the "immense frustration" of the virtual impossibility of accessing good legal advice. Ed Blisset, senior regional organiser of the GMB general union, which represents most of the employees, had expressed to Group 4 his concerns about the centre. "We had warned Group 4 about staffing levels and inadequate training of DCOs [detention custody officers]," says Blisset, "and shortly before February 14, we warned them that there was trouble brewing." Earlier on the day of the fire, local MPs Alistair Burt and Patrick Hall had a meeting with the then immigration minister, Lord Rooker, during which they spoke about the tensions at Yarl's Wood.

Those tensions came to a head when Eunice Igbegwe, a sick woman in her 50s, fell foul of an arbitrary ruling. She is an asylum seeker from Anambra state in Nigeria, where her politician husband was murdered in violent political upheavals in March 1999. During his funeral, her house and many others in their town were burned to the ground. Igbegwe made her way to the UK and claimed asylum in 2002. She was turned down and taken to Yarl's Wood. Old beyond her years, she now walks with a stick.

On the morning of February 14, Igbegwe told a DCO that she wanted to see a doctor, she felt as if "everything is coming away, downwards". She has since been diagnosed with uterine prolapse. Seen by a nurse, but denied immediate access to a doctor, she was upset. That evening, as she made her way to the prayer room in the male wing, as she had done many times before, she was told she could go no further. Distraught and angry, she protested and emotions flared. Four DCOs held her down. She was shouting, "They're going to kill me." Some detainees witnessing this scene battered at the thick window in a locked door as Igbegwe was dragged into a stairwell where she was left with three other detainees and two DCOs.

In court, as successive witnesses were called to the stand, a story unfolded of chaos and fear, of power cuts, people trying to escape through heavily reinforced windows, others barricading themselves in, cameras being smashed, a shop looted. At some point - and it remains unclear when exactly - a fire started in the detention reception area. At 8pm a radio message went out to all staff to evacuate the building. Sobbing, one of four DCOs who had barricaded themselves into an office with a detainee, told the court that he had been fearful for his life as threats were shouted through the door; in the end he was rescued by detainees. As he emerged, he said, Kalu and Jacobs put their arms around him, a gesture the prosecution described as a cynical attempt to look good. Later, after Igbegwe and her small group were released from the locked stairwell by a DCO; she was put in a "secure cell", as were several others, among them some of the defendants.

Police had been called just after 8pm, but were not given control until 1am. Instead, prison service "Tornado teams" were called in and police surrounded the perimeter. Shortly afterwards, firefighters were called. The fire officer in charge that night says they were not obstructed from going "into the site" but had to wait before tackling the fire at close quarters because firefighters should not be exposed to risks "in a situation of potential disorder". A first fire was extinguished but, according to two firefighters from the local station, there was a delay before a second fire could be properly fought: firefighters felt frustrated that they could not get into the building and could do no more than hose water on it from a distance. "They were held back from firefighting duties, despite the fact that they were aware there were people inside," said one. Within hours, fire had gutted half of the centre. Perimeter gates were forced open, but police drove detainees back. Hundreds of detainees were huddled against the perimeter fence, away from the fire, before being pushed back to the sports field at the rear of the blocks.

As the night wore on, detainees were herded into the sports hall and photographed, searched and processed. Group 4 staff pointed out to a detective inspector those they suspected were involved in the disorder. The prosecution later said that Group 4 had used a "rough and ready process" to identify "troublemakers" and separate them. In the ensuing days, 70 were taken to prison and 12 were charged.

At the time, some - including Jacobs, Kalu, Momodou and Kayode - were taken to the segregation unit, where detainees have spoken of being deprived of mattresses and covers, of food being given to them "as you would to an animal" and of being kept there, in the case of Jacobs, for 17 days. Eunice Igbegwe, also held in the segregation unit, was not charged with any offence, then or afterwards. She was taken to a women's prison when the centre was closed down on March 30. In the first week of the trial, it emerged that she was to be deported, despite the possibility that she could be a key defence witness. Legal pressure stopped the deportation.

During a break in the first week of the trial, I sat in the foyer beside Klodjan Gaba. He was open and vulnerable, chain-smoking and tugging uncomfortably at the collar of his suit. It is hard to imagine him setting fire to anything but a cigarette. He is another face in the crowd, you wouldn't notice him until he smiles - he has one of those smiles that lights up a room. Gaba was charged with arson and violent disorder. He spent more than a year in prison, where despair and the harsh conditions drove him to attempt suicide three times. And then before the trial, the arson charge was dropped. A few weeks into the trial, so was the lesser one of violent disorder. A free man, Gaba headed for the door, but immigration officials were waiting and arrested him. There followed a three-day ride around the UK's detention centres, from Harmondsworth near Heathrow to Dungavel in Lanarkshire, during which it was impossible to communicate with his solicitor. As bizarre as this seems, it is not unusual - many asylum seekers have similar stories. Gaba was then handcuffed and put on a plane back to his native Albania where, according to his solicitor, who has visited him, he is without money, in hiding, living in a derelict building .

From Dukat, a village near Vlore in Albania, he is the third of four children. His father had a petrol station in the village. They lived well and were happy, until February 1997 when his father was threatened: hand over his savings or his garage would be blown up. "It was like that," says Gaba, sighing, "everyone had guns, like mafia." His father was not well, "he had pains in the heart", so he asked Klodjan's uncle to collect the money. The uncle agreed, but as he was returning through the village, he and his two sons, aged 19 and 23, were shot dead in their car. "People heard the shots and came to the scene, so they didn't get the money," says Gaba. The gunmen weren't going to give up: they threatened the father again: pay up or you'll end up like your brother. The family left that night. Gaba went in the first car driven by neighbours, while the rest of his family travelled in another car.

Gaba's car arrived at the port first, just as a boat was about to leave. Gaba jumped into it and arrived safely in Brindisi, Italy. As he waited past dawn for his family in the harbour, the news came through that a boat had sunk. Gaba was shown a list of names of those who had drowned and asked if any of them were those of his family. They were all on the list. Heartbroken, he made his way to the UK in the back of a container truck, using money his father had entrusted to him in case they were separated.

As a minor, Gaba was fostered under UK law, claimed asylum and settled in Folkestone. In time, he found a flat and a job managing a burger bar. A young man of great charm, he made a life for himself, renaming himself Danny. He thought he was safe, until one day an Albanian walked into the burger bar and asked for directions. As they walked out of the door, the man pulled a knife on him. Bystanders came to Gaba's aid and the man escaped. Gaba then phoned his house in Dukat and someone answered, saying only, "Are you still alive?" Neighbours he contacted warned him not to come home. "In Albanian blood feuds, they kill someone and then say, who's left in that family, and they come to find you," Gaba says.

Gaba didn't know his asylum appeal had failed because the letter telling him the news didn't reach him. Nor did he know at the time that the application omitted the crucial story of his family's deaths. The first he knew of the rejection was on January 7, 2002, when an immigration snatch squad arrested and handcuffed him at the burger bar, forbidding him to go to his flat and collect his belongings. When he finally got bail just before the trial began this year, his flat had been robbed and all his possessions were gone, including his bank card - his £1,200 savings had become a £1,300 overdraft.

The remaining men in the dock sat beside each other day after day, composed, sometimes downcast, always quiet. They seemed cohesive, connected to one another, trapped fugitives.

Gaba is not the only one of these men who has lost parents. Nigerians Lucky Jacobs and Thomas Kalu are here because their fathers' deaths left both young men in danger. Both fathers were village chiefs. Jacobs' father had let it be known that he thought a long-running feud over some land between their village and another was immoral: he said the land really belonged to the other village. In June 1998, machete-wielding assailants came in the night and hacked his father to death. Jacobs tried to help him but was beaten back. His stepmother and her two little girls looked on in helpless terror. Jacobs was expected to inherit his father's role as chief; but his father had warned him against involving himself in the bloody land dispute. To refuse to follow tradition would, Jacobs says, have cost him his life. He speaks softly and seriously. "I feared they would kill me, too. People disappear, they die, you sometimes see bodies by the side of the road, there is constant fear. If you go against them, they eliminate you." He fled.

His journey was hard - across the desert in an overcrowded Jeep, left to walk for three nights through the Moroccan hinterlands, dodging gendarmes until he made it to Spain, where he was allowed to stay. He lived in Spain for two and half years, during which time he saved enough money for the air fare to Texas, where he planned to join an uncle and continue his education. But he had no passport. He bought one from an Englishman he met along the way, who told him air fares were cheaper in England. He made his way to the UK, where he bought a ticket to Dallas. Advised to dress properly by the agent who sold him the bent passport, he remembers he wore a black suit, a green shirt and a red and black tie: "I didn't look dodgy." It was his bad luck that the airline check-in assistant that day was new and anxiously double-checked everything with a supervisor. "They searched everything and even opened my Mario Puzo novel page by page. But they were nice to me and didn't treat me like a suspect," Jacobs says. "They offered me tea - I had missed the plane by then. Then a man came and stamped the ticket with a red stamp saying 'Rejected'. They took me to an office and police appeared. They said, 'Tell us how you came by this passport.' I told them." He was arrested and spent the next 16 months in prison.

Jacobs had never seen the inside of a prison, but as shocked as he was to find himself in one, he says he was not as badly off as others he met there. It didn't cheer him up. "I saw worse cases than mine and that is when I lost hope of being free again. There was one guy who had been there for a long time because of problems with immigration. It's very difficult to admit to yourself that you won't get out easily. You ask immigration advisers how long it will take and they say they don't know because the Home Office have so much to do. No answers - no hope. We heard we were supposed to be in detention centres, not prisons. You haven't got a choice, they'd say, this isn't your country, go back. In Africa, we hear of British people going to rescue people, you hear the people are really nice. I feel betrayed. Sometimes you cry like a baby."

Now 23, Jacobs feels little hope for the future. "I don't care much what tomorrow brings, but no way will things change unless we speak out. I don't want sympathy for me. I just want people to get it straight. The way people are treated is a denial of what they deserve," he says. "You feel hurt, deceived, humiliated, frustrated - that you shouldn't lie, that life is meaningless if this is the way human beings live. And yet the people who put you in that situation are educated, enlightened people."

It was a relief at first to be transferred to Yarl's Wood not long after it opened in November 2001. He was among other asylum seekers, in better surroundings. "But I soon began to see how bad things really were," he says. "The Group 4 officers were not trained to handle such a huge project and some looked at you as though you were taking away their milk and honey." Other staff were sympathetic, says Jacobs, and saw the detainees' point of view.

Detention centres are supposed to be places where people are sent for short periods pending deportation. Barbara Roche, immigration minister when Yarl's Wood was at the planning stage, explained that it was meant for "people at the end of the asylum process who had failed in their application to gain asylum, who had lost their appeals and who were about to be removed from the country and whom officials believed would abscond, instead of accepting - as many asylum seekers do - that they had to go."

Ten days after the fire, immigration minister Lord Rooker admitted in the House of Commons that, of almost 400 detainees at Yarl's Wood, only 46 had notification of their removal dates. In other words, impending removal - the justification Roche had given for building Yarl's Wood in a hurry to meet removal quotas - was imminent in only a small number of cases. The majority were in limbo - it can take many months between a refusal and the issuing of a deportation date. Seventy-two detainees had asylum appeals outstanding and were therefore not "removable".

Among the defendants on trial, most had reached the end of the asylum process and were, in Home Office jargon, failed asylum seekers. For some, the "failure" was a result of bad legal assistance, and they are considering taking new cases.

Petr Hrubis did not fit the Roche criteria at all. When he was locked up at Yarl's Wood, his appeal was still pending. He was transferred to the detention centre from Durham prison, where he had been serving six months for driving without insurance. A small, slight man in his mid-30s, with terrible scars on his face, he is a truck driver from a town on the Czech-German border. Like all Roma, he was vulnerable to racist attacks - something that got worse with the advent of democracy: "Everyone got freedom and it became more dangerous to be a Roma. After the revolution, there were plenty of drugs, unemployment and mafia. Anyone seen not to be Czech... 'You take our job, you Gypsy Slovak.' "

In one attack, in 1991, his nose was almost sliced off. In 1998, in a near-fatal racist attack, he was beaten up and his jaw and a cheekbone were broken. When he was well enough, he fled to the UK. He got a job, arriving before asylum seekers were forbidden to work. The attacks continued: a gang of youths in Newcastle, where he had settled, took his mobile phone and one of them smashed him in the face. "He had gloves on and something in the gloves."

Like Gaba, Hrubis spent a year agonising about the violent disorder charge. Like Gaba, he needn't have: charges against him were dropped early in the trial for lack of evidence. He was granted exceptional leave to remain - fortunately because, before the charges were dropped, reports of the trial in the Czech press branded him a criminal, which has rebounded on his family.

Henry Momodou and George Tuka seem very different - Tuka is a wiry, excitable Kosovan, a bit of a lad, Momodou a big, mellow Nigerian. But both have put down roots in the UK, both have children here and both have had stormy love lives.

Momodou, in his late 30s, has been living in the UK since 1983, and has family living and working here. He went back to Nigeria in 1992 when his father, a police commissioner, died suddenly. Despite intervention from his MP, the Home Office failed to renew Momodou's visa in time before he left for the funeral, but said that could be done at the embassy in Lagos. When it came to it, the embassy refused. Momodou was married at the time to a UK citizen, who had returned to London. After a year waiting for him to return, she divorced him. Despairing of ever being able to return, Momodou ran his father's construction company and went into politics, working for the election of Chief Abiola. In 1992, Abiola's election success was annulled and Abiola imprisoned. Momodou was then victimised by General Sani Abacha's opposition forces, his business destroyed and his life threatened when he was stopped at gunpoint by heavies in an unmarked police car. He was warned to get away if he wanted to stay alive. He returned to the UK without a visa and claimed asylum, but was turned down.

Four years had passed since he had been in the UK; his divorce had come through in the interim. In 1997, he married again. His new wife had a Portuguese passport, which meant her spouse was entitled to live in the UK. However, the couple separated and eventually Momodou formed a relationship with a Sierra Leonean refugee who has leave to remain in the UK. Their son was born in June 2001. As he cradled a photo of the child, it looked the size of a stamp in Momodou's big hand.

Stopped during a spot check in a car in London's West End, Momodou was told he was an "overstayer". He thought he was safe because his former wife, from whom he was not yet divorced, had a European passport, thus offering her spouse the right to remain. To his shock, her passport turned out to be a fake. After three attempts to deport him were thwarted by his lawyer, Momodou had been expecting to be bailed out of Yarl's Wood on February 15, the day after the fire. It's not how things panned out.

George Tuka's English girlfriend was pregnant when an immigration snatch squad came for him early one morning. Tuka became increasingly emotional as he told his story during a cafe lunch break from the court: "I went to prison. I never thought I would see a prison. My fiancee supported me, but it was very hard for her and she went off with another man. When the baby was born, I was in the police station, so I couldn't be there. I saw my daughter after seven months when I got bail. I went to see my fiancee. She wanted the best for her daughter and said she would stay with the other man. I don't blame her. I lost my love. I lost my kid." He is almost in tears.

Tuka fears that if he returns to Kosovo, he will be shot. So does fellow Kosovan Behar Lemani. Both are trapped in the crossfire of inter-ethnic violence. Lemani, whose father is Kosovan and Muslim, and whose mother, now dead, was a Gypsy and a Catholic, faced discrimination as the child of a mixed marriage. Driven out of the mosque, Lemani and his siblings couldn't go to school and were taught at home by their father. Lemani can barely read and write. When he grew up, he fell in love with a Kosovan girl whose family hated Gypsies and tried to kill him. His choices were narrow: take his chances against her gun-toting family or escape into neighbouring Serb territory and face anti-Kosovan hostility. It got worse when the Kosovan Liberation Army tried to force him to join up, shooting him in the arm in the process. He went on the run to Macedonia and, through Gypsy friends, got on a truck for the UK, arriving in October 2001. He was locked up in Campsfield, outside Oxford, and then in Yarl's Wood. On the night of the fire, he escaped and was arrested shortly afterwards.

As Gaba waited on the dockside for his family, or Jacobs walked through the desert hinterland, or Lemani sat in a truck full of TVs, or Momodou looked down the barrel of a gun, UK politicians were planning to extend their detention estate to 4,000 places. Security is profitable. Group 4 Falck, which runs Yarl's Wood, is the world's second largest security services provider. A consortium called Group 4 Amey Immigration Ltd (GAIL) was contracted to build Yarl's Wood at a cost of around £100m. Group 4 is now suing Bedfordshire police for £100m worth of damages in connection with the fire.